DHL Express has deployed a new pricing system from the French specialist Open Pricer to supportits pricing decision-makers worldwide.
Based in Paris, Open Pricer provides pricing technology and pricing intelligence for companiesin the transportation and logistics, financial services, digital advertising, telecom and travelindustries. It helps them maximise their pricing power with a typical effect of 2 to 3% additionalnet margin.
DHL previously used various in-house tools to support its pricing decisions. With Open Pricer,it now has an integrated system with reliable and consistent data (Oracle central database) tomanage customer accounts, shipments, tariffs and costs for all countries in the DHL network, theFrench company said.
“We selected Open Pricer after a detailed review of the pricing applications available in themarket followed by a rigorous proof of concept,” Mark James, Senior VP Global Pricing, at DHLExpress said.
“Open Pricer has been deployed to support the price decision making for all our global deals. Weoperate in over 220 countries so we had to be sure the application selected could support ourcomplex business requirements, provide accurate recommendations and be scalable to handle very bigdata,” he added. “Open Pricer will enable DHL to respond very quickly to customers RFQs and improvesignificantly our pricing process thanks to more accurate and traceable pricing decision.”
The French company said that Open Pricer helps sales managers negotiate customer contracts thatare different from the applicable price policy in terms of discount or tariff structure. The systemallows pricing analysts to simulate the future income and profitability of the potential deal basedon the forecasted shipment profile, the recommended tariff and the network cost model). It alsobenchmarks this pricing analysis against other tariffs including current customer tariff,competitors’ tariffs and comparable customers’ tariffs.
Open Pricer handles new business contracts and extensions/changes to current contracts. With itshelp, DHL can manage pricing decisions for very large international deals where customers ship frommultiple countries to anywhere in the world and with very complex tariff structures includingpersonalised origin and destination tariff zones.
Other transport and logistics firms using Open Pricer include French firms Geodis Ciblex, Tatex(now owned by FedEx) and Chronopost in Portugal.
